MAY 2 4 1916 



DISCOURSE 



COMMEMORATIVE OF THE 



CHARACTER AND CAREER 



HON. JOHN PARKEE HALE. 



JELIVERED IN THE 



First Pari.sli Cliurcli, Dover, N. H. 



ON THANKSGIVING DAY, NOV, 27, 1873. 

BY REV. GEORGE B/'SPALDING. 



CONCORD, N. H. : 

PUINTED BY THE KEPUBLICAN PRESS ASSOCIATJON. 
1874. 






CORRESPONDENCE. 



Dover, N. H., December 19, 1873. 
Rev. George B. Spalding : 

Dear Sir — Having listened with great interest on last Thanksgiving- 
Day to your discourse commemorative of the late Hon. John P. Hale, 
we are of opinion that its pi;blication would be of great service in help- 
ing mankind to form a true estimate of Mr. Hale's character and 
achievements. We would therefore respectfully request you to place 
the discourse at our disposal, for publication in pamphlet form. 
Very truly, your obedient servants, 

E. H. Rollins. Oliver Wyatt. 

Z. S. Wallingford. John Bracewell. 

Daniel Hall. E. J. Lane. 

George W. Benn. T. J. W. Pray. 

John R. Varney. Joseph W. Welch. 

A. H. Young. Levi G. Hill. 

Edward P. Hodsdon. James H. Wheeler. 
Wells Waldron. 



Dover, N. H., December 23, 1873. 
To Hon. E. H. Rollins, Z. S. AVallingford, Esq., Hon. Daniel 
Hall, and others : 

Gentlemen — If the publication of my discourse will serve to deepen 
in men a sense of their obligation to Mr. Hale for his distinguished pub- 
lic services, and add a single leaf to the laurels with which, I feel sure, 
a grateful posterity will wreathe his name, I shall be equally happy 
with you in having submitted the manuscript to your hands. 
Most sincerely yours, 

Geo. B. Spalding. 



DISCOURSE. 



ROMANS 13:7. 

RENDER THEREFORE TO ALL THEIR DUES: TRIBUTE TO WHOM 
TRIBUTE IS due; CUSTOM TO WHOM CUSTOM; FEAR TO WHOM 
fear; HONOR TO WHOM HONOR. 

Great men are the choicest gifts which God bestows 
upon a people. In this respect he hath not forgotten 
to be ij-racious to us. 

o 

"Great men have liv'd among us. Heads that planned 
And tongues that uttered wisdom , — better, none. 

* * * * * * * 

Even so doth Heaven protect us!" 

To feel this truth, to be profoundly grateful for it, — 1 
know of no thank,sgiving worthier than this, none 
more acceptable to God than this. 

It has been the crime of men in all ages, that they 
have turned against their greatest ones ; have scorned 
them while living, and belittled them when dead. The 
Israelites murmured and rebelled against Moses. The 
Athenians ostracized Aristides, and gave the hemlock 
to Socrates. The men at Rome proscribed Cicero, and. 
when they had put him to death, nailed his hands to 



the Rostra, to moulder there in mockery of the tri- 
umphs of his eloquence. The Florentines racked, 
strangled, and burnt Savonarola. England derided 
and cursed the mighty Cromwell while he lived, and, 
when dead, dug up his bones and hung them on a gal- 
lows. Are republics less ungrateful and wicked? or. 
do we of this age and country show ourselves to be 
true children of these who killed the prophets ? 

It must be confessed that, in our past history, we 
have been guilty of traducing the characters of even 
our greatest and best. Washington, Hamilton, Jeffer- 
son, and others of as distinguished merit who have 
lived in our own day, were assailed with reproaches 
and caliunnies during their careers. Their memories 
have been handed down to us blackened by many an 
accusation begotten of party bigotry and hatred. 

I love to think that an advancing Christianity is 
making us wiser and better, — more charitable and 
more reverent toward our great men ; that, despite all 
partisan prejudice and personal opposition, we are com- 
ino; to reorard them as the best bestowment of God 
upon us, as charged with some divine mission or mes- 
sasre to us and our o-eneration. I find a ii:round for so 
great faith in the spectacle which has been presented, 
as a distinguished man and great public actor has been 
summoned from the scene of his toils and triumphs, — 
this universal testimonial from men of opposing views 
and principles to the excellence of his character and 
the greatness of his work. I think that, to-day, how- 



ever much we may differ among ourselves, and from 
him who has gone from us, in regard to those pubHc 
measures which engaged his splendid powers, we weep 
together over his grave in mingled respect and affec- 
tion for him, and on this thanksgiving occasion can 
thank God for what he achieved for truth and liberty ; 
for the wisdom that saw the right, and the firmness 
that maintnined it ; for his rare abilities in thou2:ht 
and speech, and for the rich legacj^ he has bequeathed 
us of patriotism and devotion, of loyalty to God and 
to man. 

Let us, as best we may, bring back before us the 
character and career of our illustrious townsman, — the 
brilliant lawyer, the fearless, indomitable public leader, 
the untarnished senator, the true brother and cham- 
pion of his entire race, John Parker Hale. 

The first glimpse which I catch of him is full of 
pathos, and is most significant. In his earl}^ bojhood 
he lost his father, a parent tenderly loved and revered. 
It is said, by neighbors who sympathized wdth the boy 
in his early sorrow, that for a long time he was wont 
to go forth at early morning hour, or in the solemn 
evenino;: twiliaj-ht, and kneel down bv the father's o-rave 
to pray. The figure of that kneeling boy, in that 
rude graveyard, is the most fixed and prominent rec- 
ollection which some have of him whom we honor 
to-day. 

If I know anything of New England character and 
of the power of New England training, 1 know that 



6 



both have from the first been so distinctly religious, 
that most of our o:reat men have had their natures 
permeated with great religious sentiments and prin- 
ciples. I think of John Adams, taught in his infancy 
to repeat the prayer which he never after forgot to 
utter to the close of his magnificent career, " Now I 
lay me down to sleep;" I think of Webster, who, ac- 
cording to his own words, was taught to lisp, at his 
mother's feet and on his father's knee, texts from the 
Scripture ; I think of this young boy, easing his break- 
ing heart in prayers to God over his father's grave ; 
and I see how it was that one and all of them, in all 
after life, despite all their mistakes, despite, it may 
be, the absence of an open and professed piety, mani- 
fested the presence and power in them of a profoundly 
religious nature. In this I find the key to their char- 
acters. In this I see an explanation of that deep 
moral earnestness, that solemnity and grandeur, which 
came out in all their great speech and action. 

Mr. Hale graduated at Bowdoin college at an early 
age, distinguishing himself more by his brightness and 
versatility than by his accurate scholarship. He stud- 
ied law here in Dover in the office of Hon. Daniel M. 
Christie, and was admitted to the bar of this county 
in 1830. His character as a lawyer was manifested in 
its entire fulness in the first trial which he conducted. 
It comes from one who was present on the occasion, 
and is eminently able to gauge the merits of men in 
his profession, that this effort of Mr. Hale's, thougli 



often repeated, was never surpassed. He sprang full- 
armed into the arena, and, at the very beginning of his 
career, struck his blows with the same consummate 
skill and force with which he dealt them at the very 
last. 

Mr. Hale was preeminently an advocate. His real 
place was before a jury. He understood law, — but its 
great principles rather than its technicalities. And 
these first he had mastered, not by close, severe study, 
but by a kind of intuitive insight, coupled with a 
quick, retentive memory, which treasured up for his 
ready use decisions and arguments to which he had 
once listened, or of which he had once cursorily read. 
As he stood up before the jury, not drilled to his task 
by painstaking care, but inspired by the occasion, by 
the very faces M'hich confronted him, with his large, 
generous form, his free, open gestures, all lighted with 
a soul that was earnest with conviction, with Avords 
singularly facile but terse and fall of force, holding 
his flashing lance straight and steadily to the one 
point in the case, and driving it home with his splendid 
bursts of feeling, he was well-nigh irresistible. He 
was full of imagination, but his imagery never blunted 
the edge of his blade, nor impeded the vigor of his 
blow. His speech was like an Eastern scimitar, bright 
and dazzling, and yet keen in edge, cutting to the 
marrow. 

Let me give you an instance. It was during one of 
those famous trials growing out of the rescue of the 



slave Shadrach at Boston. Mr. Hale had read from 
the reports numerous decisions to the effect that slav- 
ery is against the law of God, the law of nature, and 
the laws of England and Massachusetts. He also read 
from the laws of Virginia and other Southern states to 
show that a person of Shadrach's color (not a negro) 
is even there presumed to be free, and cannot be 
proved a slave except by evidence of descent from an 
African slave-mother, and that possession and holding 
of a slave did not afford a presumption of slavery. 
He then said, — " Now, gentlemen, it appears that there 
is no slavery by the law of England, by the law of 
Massachusetts, by the law of nature ; and these old 
Judges say, — mind, Your Excellency, /do not say this ; 
it would be treason; so unequivocal a recognition of 
the higher law would be treason in me, — but these old 
Judges say that it is against the law of God ! Against 
all these laws, against all this evidence, against all 
these presumptions, comes one John DeBree from 
Norfolk, Virginia, and says that he owns him! This is 
all the evidence. The mere breath of the slave-catch- 
er's mouth turns a man into another man's chattel ! 
Suppose John DeBree had said that he owned the 
moon, or the stars, or had an exclusive right to the 
sunshine, would you find it so by your verdict? But, 
'j-entlemen, the stars shall fjide and fall from heaven ; 
the moon shall grow old and decay; the.heavens them- 
selves shall pass away as a scroll, — but the soul of the 
despised and hunted Shadrach shall live on with the 



9 

life of God himself! I wonder if John DeBree will 
say that he owns him then ! " 

It is said that neither court nor marshals could 
check the long and tumultuous applause wliich fol- 
lowed. Here is finest wit and genuine humor, and 
vivid, bold imagination, and most felicitous language ; 
but under all, like an ocean's peal, we hear the solemn 
movement of a profoundly earnest soul, 

I think that, as we follow the man on in liis great 
career, and note those passages which have been and 
always will be treasured up as specimens of masterly 
power and eloquence, Ave shall find that they, one and 
all, were spoken when his moral nature was most 
deeply stirred ; when his soul quivered with a sense 
of God and his eternal and immutable truths. 

During the first fourteen years after Mr. Hale was 
admitted to the bar, he was a prominent and active 
member of the democratic party, and, as such, was 
honored with various offices. In 1832 he represented 
this party in the state legislature, where he at once 
became conspicuous as an ever-ready and most effec- 
tive debater. In 1843 he was elected to congress. At 
this time both of the great political organizations in 
the state and nation were entirely neutral in respect 
to the matter of slavery. Neither party carried its 
policy into the domain of morals. They stood apart 
upon mere questions of finance and internal economy. 
A little handful of folk, despised alike by wliig and 
democrat, were for pushing politics into the realm of 



10 

conscience. One of their number, a former pastor of 
this church, Rev. David Root, had made a memorable 
speech at the meeting of the pioneer anti-slavery 
society, in the hall of the Massachusetts house of rep- 
resentatives, in which he declared " The great moral 
war is but just begun." And yet we find Mr. Hale, 
in the first session of congress in which he sat, so true 
to his moral instincts, that when an attempt was made to 
suppress the right of petition in respect to the matter 
of slavery, he opposed the movement, expressing, in 
eloquent language, his determination to defend to the 
last the position that any party or class has the right 
to petition for the redress of grievances. I think that 
it was Mr. Hale's speech on this subject which drew 
to him, by his peculiar eloquence, the attention of the 
house, — members leaving their seats and thronging 
around him, — and won for him the sobriquet of the 
"White Mountain Cataract." 

At the closing session of the twenty-eighth con- 
f^ress, a resolution was introduced, under the stimulus 
of President Tyler's message, for the annexation of 
Texas as a slave state. It was not a measure of the 
democratic party: it was, rather, a personal scheme of 
the president's. It was denounced by prominent 
democratic cono-ressmen ; and I think that the testi- 
mony of the party in this state was, for a time at 
least, straight against it. Mr. Hale put himself on 
record, by speech, resolution, and ballot, as opposed to 
the mensure. He was not long in discovering that 



11 

his position was not approved at home ; and, further 
on, he came to see that his continued opposition to 
the annexation scheme would prove his political death- 
warrant. He was at this time the nominee of his 
party for reelection ; but he knew that his votes and 
action on this measure would result in his being 
finally repudiated by his political friends. Still he 
wavered not. Rather, he went forward and fore- 
stalled *his doom by wu^iting a letter addressed to his 
constituents, in which he declared thnt the reasons 
given by the advocates of the annexation scheme 
"were eminently worthj^ to provoke the scorn of 
earth and the judgment of Heaven." In the conven- 
tion of his party, which immediately followed, Mr. 
Hale's name was struck from the ticket by an unani- 
mous vote. Mr. Hale then be^-an to make those 
appeals to the people, in which the powers of his pe- 
culiar and versatile eloquence had full play. He 
spoke before crowded audiences in great halls, or to 
the few who gathered in school-houses or in the open 
air, to listen to his impassioned vindications. The 
meetiniz: in the old North church, at Concord, will 
never be forgotten. Mr. Hale went there an object of 
bitter hatred to his old friends, — not accepted by the 
other great party, — alone. In that speech in the 
church, in the presence of an excited, crowded audi- 
ence, his voice attuned to the promptings of his 
deepest convictions, rang out those ever-memorable 
words, — " I expected to be called ambitious, to have 



12 



ray name cast out as evil, to be traduced and misrep- 
resented, I liave not been disappointed. But if 
things have come to this condition, that conscience 
and a sacred regard for truth and duty are to be pub- 
Hcly held up to ridicule and scouted at without rebuke, 
as has just been done here, it matters little whether 
we are annexed to Texas, or Texas is annexed to us. 
I may be permitted to say that the measure of my 
ambition will be full, if, when my earthly career shall 
be finished, and my bones are laid beneath the soil of 
New Hampshire, and my wife and children shall re- 
pair to my grave to drop the tear of affection to my 
memory, they may read on my tombstone, — ' He who 
lies beneath, surrendered office and place and power, 
rather than bow down and worship slavery.' " I think 
that the bitterest political opponent who to-day sur- 
vives Mr. Hale, must admire his lofty, intrepid spirit, 
as thus manifested, concede his perfect honesty, and 
confess that, now, as he sleeps beneath New Hamp- 
shire soil, after nearly thirty years of fearless and 
persistent opposition to a great wrong, he may fairly 
claim the proud epitaph which he once craved. 

More than a quarter of a century has passed awa}' 
since this man began to bear so great testimony to the 
truth that was in him. What effects followed his no- 
ble words, as he spoke here and there in his little dis- 
trict meetings, he knew not to the full. Now, when 
so many years are fled, and he at last has gone from 
earth, one and another comes forth to acknowledge 



the sovereign power of his words in molding their 
opinions and characters. During the present week I 
received a letter from a distinguished scholar and great 
public benefactor. It reads thus : "I noticed the death 
of Mr. John P. Hale, in the morning papers, as I was 
riding in the cars a few" days since, and, turning to a 
friend, expressed my personal obligations for the ser- 
vices he had rendered me years ago, one afternoon, 
under the shadow of the old academy, in Keene, N. H. 
He had come home from congress, cast off by the 
democratic party for his opposition to its pro-slavery 
designs upon Texas and the territories of the United 
States. He stood up before a little company of twenty 
or thirty men and boys, — some of them old, liberty- 
loving men, and a few old-line whigs and democrats, — 
drawn by curiosity to hear what he might say for an 
act they regarded as political suicide. There was one 
man there, an 'old-line democrat' as his father Avas 
before him, who listened with profound attention, and 
was persuaded of the thorough moral earnestness and 
honesty of the speaker, and then of the correctness 
of his views, and from that hour became first an in- 
dependent democrat, then a free-soiler, and last a 
republican, in which he still abides, grateful for the 
words and influence of John P. Hale ; and to-day signs 
himself cordially yours, 



In 1846 Mr. Hale was chosen a member of the 
state legislature, — was made speaker, and subse- 



14 



quently elected to the United States senate, the first 
anti-slavery senator ever in that body. 

Froude, in his brilliant history, in speaking of the 
rise of the English drama, says, — "We allow ourselves 
to think of Shakspeare, or of Raphael, or of Phidias, 
as having accomplished their work by the power of 
their own individual genius ; but greatness like theirs 
is never more than the highest degree of an excel- 
lence which prevailed widely around it, and forms the 
environment in which it grows." The principle is 
doubtless correct. Great men are but the embodiment 
of the ideas of their age. Applying this principle to 
such a character and career as that of Mr. Hale's, we 
may say that he was the great, consummate leader 
that he was, because he so fully represented the feel- 
ings, the conscience, the moral instincts of the people 
among whom he moved. And yet this detracts noth- 
ing from the excellency of the man, nor the grandeur 
of his work. The true virtue was doubtless in the 
people. The love of liberty, hatred of wrong and 
oppression, without a doubt, were in the tinder; but it 
was the spark from his great, generous, truthful heart 
that struck the sluggish mass to kindle it into flame. 
Reijcardino; Mr. Hale from the time when he first broke 
with his party and appealed to the people, onward 
through all his senatorial career, we say of him that 
he was intended of Heaven to be a public leader, 
rather than a statesman ; to interpret to the people 
their conscience and moral feeling and purest politi- 



15 



cal aspirations, rather than to organize them into a 
compact and discipHned party, and gather up their 
sentiments and principles into some legislative code 
or some administrative policy. Into every revolu- 
tionary period God sends some such man to do the 
great needed work. It is the people's heart that must 
be stirred ; its holy passions that must be aroused ; 
its patriotism, devotion, self-sacrifice, all high and dar- 
ing qualities, that must be kindled into heat, before 
those movements can take place which breakdown 
the strong barriers of custom and precedent, tear 
asunder hoary institutions of wrong, topple into the 
dust the thrones of kings, and, if need be, overturn 
the whole social order, that truth and liberty may not 
die from off the face of the earth. To thus touch the 
people's heart, and evoke its passion and life, a prophet 
is needed, — one who can speak in the inspiration of 
his own burning thoughts and feelings. It was so in 
our fathers' day. James Otis and Patrick Henry w'ere 
the evangels of our American liberty. Theirs were 
the voices which were heard ringing in the wilderness. 
They did a work as mighty as that of Washington 
and Adams, whose genius it was to organize the forces 
which these others had called into life ; to put them 
into serried columns on the field of battle, and con- 
struct them into the union of states and the constitu- 
tion of a great nation. Mr. Hale was the Patrick 
Henry of our revolutionary age. His clarion voice, 
wherever heard, — in the congressional hall, or from the 



16 

platform, — electrified the people, and challenged them, 
for twenty long years, to a deeper and deeper indig- 
nation against the great wrong of the nation. His 
speeches in the senate chamber were meant for other 
ears than grave and reverend senators. They were 
not carefully prepared orations. They were not for 
the elucidation of some perplexing subject of finance. 
They were not in exposition of constitutional law. 
They were brief, witty, scathing replies, or magnifi- 
cent bursts of feeling and righteous wrath, or jocose 
allusions and illustrations, under the fun and laughter 
of which the keen blade glittered, or solemn, pro- 
phetic warning and appeal, — all these, from first to 
last, bearing upon the one great evil, and all addressed 
to that vast, to him ever-visible audience, which, in all 
the cities and villages, and in every hamlet of the North 
and West, were listening, some in rage, and some in 
fervid sympathy, but all listening with profound inter- 
est, to the words which leaped from his lips. 

And how skilfully Heaven fitted its chosen instru- 
ment for this great, perilous work ! It was wonderful ! 
Other congressmen spoke in opposition to slavery, and 
then became silent through fear. Others only evoked 
an answering wrath, which took from their arguments 
half their power. But here was one who stood, through 
the battle of twenty years, the most conspicuous knight 
of them all, striking with the heavy and lightning 
stroke of a Coeur de Lion, but with such good hearti- 
ness, such imperturbable temper, such rollicking fun, 



17 

in the Avild medley of the great fight, that his ene- 
mies fell back to pay homage to his magnanimity, his 
courage, his genuine feeling, his irresistible, large fel- 
lowship and good nature. I lemember, when in 1858 
I was acting as a reporter in a Southern commercial 
convention in Savannah, where Yancey and Rhett, and 
Barnwell and DeBow, and other fiery sons of the 
South, poured out in red hot invective and abuse their 
hatred of Northern men, — I remember of hearing them 
speak of "Jack Hale," as they and you loved to call 
him, as a "prince of good fellows." In an after so- 
iourn of a vear in the South, minglino; with the ureat 
Southern leaders, just on the eve of those great events 
which broke upon us, when men's minds were infu- 
riated with hatred of the North, I do not recall that I 
ever heard from any of these men any word which 
indicated a bitter feelinij: aiz;ainst Mr. Hale. 

Now, such a man, one who could hold his place and 
yet all the time be true to it, faithfid and yet courte- 
ous, speaking the severest truth with such an iiiiuiita- 
ble grace of soul that his foes must needs join in 
admiration of it, — such a man, my friends, is not born 
in centuries. It was our happiest fortune that Heaven 
sent him into our age, and into the awful crisis of our 
affairs. One less courageous than he would have failed 
us. One less amiable and good-hearted would have 
been useless. 

Mr. Hale's work was practically over, when the great 
events which called and used him were over, lie 
3 



18 



bore into the later years and services of his Hfe an un- 
diminished patriotism, a severe honesty, an unabated 
zeal for the honor of the nation and the welfare of 
man. But he was like a war-frigate which lies in 
port in peaceful times, its mighty armament and its 
scarred bulwarks only suggestive of stormy days 
when its ports were up and its great guns dealt havoc 
upon the foe. Our tears before Heaven are, that he 
did not live in the rest and play of his magnificent 
powers, and, as the reward of his fidelity, rejoice 
with us in the work of his hands. 

Of his private life, of the charms of his personal 
character, you are all familiar. His sweetest and most 
attractive trait was his love of nature. He loved the 
great hill-tops, where he could see village and hamlet, 
plain and forest, and the horizon stretching away into 
its infinitude. He loved the ocean, and would sit for 
hours entranced by its ever-varying sights and sounds. 
He loved especially the hillside where he now lies, 
and from it he was wont many and many times to 
gaze in mute rapture upon the sun sinking into the 
western heavens. He loved old ways and old places. 
He was full of the simplicities of nature. — childlike, 
sportive, notional, hearty, always natural. And for it 
all you loved him with a rare fondness and pride. No 
party prejudice kept your hearts from him. When 
he came back from his foreigri mission, his old politi- 
cal opponents vied with his strong party-friends to bid 
him warmest welcome. In his sickness and sad in- 



19 



firmities, 3^0111' pities and prayers mingled. And when 
at last God had called him, and you went forth to bear 
him to his loved and longed-for resting-place, without 
thought of party differences, you, with tears and ten- 
derness, laid him with his mother Earth. 

He must have been a rare man to have thus won 
your hearts, — rare in the qualities of his social nature 
and the sweetness of his ctiaracter, as well as in his 
splendid intellectual capacities, his keen, broad mind, 
his intuitive insight, his fervid imagination, and elo- 
quent speech. Already we yearn to honor him with 
the full meed of his honor. But that cannot be. The 
smoke and dust of a tremendous conflict still cover 
the field. We, and he who moved so grandly in it, 
are not to be seen in due clearness and proportion. 
But the day is coming when the mist shall have 
cleared away, and all will stand forth in the revealing 
light of history in their true place and stature. When 
that day comes, among the greatest who wrought 
with equal skill and force to lift man into higher dig- 
nity and knit the race into closer brotherhood, and 
who taught succeeding generations the solemn, inspir- 
ing lesson of loyalty to God and right, will be seen, in 
all the loftiness of his full stature, him whom to-day 
we honor, — John Parker Hale. 



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